Dr Maxine Gee

Maxine is the Programme Leader of the BA in Scriptwriting for Film and Television. She is an internationally produced playwright, whose stage adaptation of Sherlock Holmes and the Speckled Band has been performed in both York, England and Sydney Australia. As a screenwriter, her work includes the medieval webseries Tales of Bacon and science fiction short films Terminal, developed from her PhD practice screenplay and Standing Woman, adapted from a short story by acclaimed Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui. Her screenplays have also placed in a variety of international screenwriting competitions.

Maxine completed her PhD by Creative Practice in Screenwriting, titled 'Posthuman Noir: Creating Positive Posthumans in 2017. Her research interests include posthumanism, science fiction film and television, film noir, Japanese anime, adaptation screenwriting, playwriting and the webseries.

Publications

Journal articles

Gee, M., 2023. Women as witness, victim and villain: multifaceted role-play in Fatal Frame II. Journal for cultural research.

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Gee, M., 2022. Golems Inc. Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy (4).

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Gee, M., 2015. It's Alive: An Introduction to Writing for the Screen. FOCUS, British Science Fiction Association Magazine for Writers (63), 18-26.

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Gee, M., 2017. Comics Inside Out: An Interview with Elena Vitagliano. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 3 (1).

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Gee, M., 2016. "Rediscovering our Humanity - How the posthuman noir anime, Darker Than Black, subverts the tropes of film noir to reaffirm a humanist agenda.". Cinema: Journal of Film and Philosophy, 7, 131-148.

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Chapters

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Outreach & engagement

Public engagement & outreach activities

Robot or Human? You decide. Imagine a future where robots and humans looked identical; how would you know which is which? In this interactive theatre piece members of the public were tasked with selecting from a set of questions to pose to 2 actors to decide which was human and which was a robots. The piece explored how media bias and assumptions about human emotion sway people's decisions when thinking about robots, and demonstrated how narrow the parameters of 'human' are in mainstream film and television. Festival of Learning 2018, Bournemouth University.
Imagine a future where robots and humans looked identical: how would you know who is human? In this 30-minute interactive session, as a group you will enter a space that will act as a time tunnel into the future. There you will meet two actors and face the challenge of making this very decision (the 'Turing test'), choosing from a set of questions to help you identify the 'robot'. You should be wary: not all responses are as they might seem, and there are many kinds of human minds. The public were told that one of our two colleagues from the future was a robot, and asked them a series of questions to try identify who was human. While we did have one robot and one human character, both were in fact carefully written to reflect different portrayals of autistic people. In the portrayal where autism stereotypes dovetail with robot characters, "Chris" (our robot) was logical and unemotional, without a lot of humour. In contrast, "Alex" was playful but diffident, constantly eager to please.They were based on autistic descriptions of camouflaging, which is when neurodivergent people consciously try to hide their differences and 'act neurotypical', from the way they make eye-contact, to copying their body language and speech mannerisms. Just like non-human characters are perceived more positively when they express emotions and social behaviours, autistic people are perceived more positively when they perform camouflaging behaviours, and it helps them avoid bullying or social exclusion. The problem is that camouflaging is exhausting, and it reinforces a sense of low self-worth. Autistic people who spend a lot of time camouflaging tend to have poorer mental health and also be more vulnerable to suicide. We wondered whether the general public, who might be used to depictions of non-human characters, would be led to identify Chris (our stereotypical autistic portrayal) as the robot. Actually, we found that people were conflicted, with guesses balanced between the two characters. People noticed the Uncanny Valley aspect of Alex's mannerisms, and knew there was something different about this character. We feel that the event was especially special in that it was co-produced, written and acted by an evenly split team of autistic and non-autistic people.
An invited talk as part of the inaugural Bournemouth Writing Festival, given with Matt Desmier, exploring the implications of A.I. for creative writing, drawing on my practice research project on A.I. collaborative screenwriting, giving interactive demonstration of ChatGPT

This page is a shortened version of a BU academic profile. To view the complete profile, visit our Staff Profiles site.

Publications

Journal articles

Chapters

Conferences

Internet publications

Grants

Grants

Outreach & engagement

Public engagement & outreach activities

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